Today I read an article in the New York Times (I’m not a subscriber-it got deposited outside my hotel door this morning) entitled “Pentagon Keeps Wary Watch as Troops and Their Superiors Blog.” Assuming that the piece would be filled with descriptions of rear echelon bureaucrats getting riled up about PFC Billy Bob’s love letters from the front, I set my mockery trigger to mangle and got ready to roll my eyes back into their natural position. Imagine my surprise when I learned about an “often funny and always profane” blog called Embrace the Suck. Being the ADD boy I am, I spent the next hour that I had reserved for writing this blog reading about the exploits of the 2nd Platoon Killahs. While I don’t think any specific detail about the posts are particularly fascinating or new, it’s the motto of the platoon that I embraced and reminded me of sales. Here’s an excerpt from the site:
“We have been in Iraq for more then 8 months and we all agree on one thing... this SUCKS! We left our families, our friends, our trucks and our lives to come fight a war thousands of miles away. We all choose to answer our nation's call to service for various reasons and now we are here sucking it... together! "Embracing the suck" is our platoon motto... if can't laugh at yourself or your situation... then you are seriousily missing out.”
Everything, right down to the misspellings and placement of “our trucks” in the most missed list, reminded me of the inevitable bitching that occurs when you get a bunch of sales people together in a (bar)room with no customers or management (I am definitely too immature and misbehaved to be considered management) around. Every sales blog out there has a running debate about whether their sales people are (or should be) Hunters or Farmers. [For the record, I feel you need to have the characteristics of both, but you need hunters before you can get to have farmers.] Sales people are actually Soldiers, if you ask me- trying to laugh at the lunacy and lack of control that accompany the “deadly” day-to-day combat that is the sales life.
There are all sorts of hackneyed war analogies for sales that I could trot out here, but what I want to key on is the commonality of how successful sales people and soldiers react to their predicaments- they withstand all the personal indignities and unfairness and bureaucracy, put on a smile, and forge ahead. When they get together, it all comes out in the form of “war” stories- and more often than not they are hilarious.
I write this blog as an outlet for all my pent up observations of the ridiculous. I hope that I am winning the tone battle to be lighthearted and forgiving, rather than snarky and sarcastic. I admire that the 2nd Platoon killahs are winning that battle, too. If my customers and “partners “had guns and mines and my ass was literally on the line every day, I wouldn’t be….
